In Marketing terms, Short Message Service (SMS) is currently used, predominantly, to push SMS messages to people who have opted-in to receive them. Occasionally those messages contain Internet links that people with the appropriate mobile device, applications and data plans, can click to access Internet content. These links are either standard URL's or use a traditional URL shortening service (i.e. Bit.ly, tinyurl.com, etc). When a consumer views the SMS message with the link to the content, and clicks or taps on the link, the consumer is typically led to a website that provides the Internet content to the consumer. The content website receives the request from the consumer as a new request, and cannot associate this request with the interactive SMS session that presented the link to the consumer.
To enable SMS to act as a real gateway to rich interactive content, it is important to merge the data generated from the SMS interaction, with the data generated from the User Agent and the resultant Multimedia Content Session. Indeed, uniting these disparate data sources is crucial to providing robust aggregate reporting and comprehensive interaction and session metrics.
When a Keyphrase SMS Message is sent from a mobile device to the SMS Decision Engine, requesting a multimedia link, certain SMS metadata is collected (as examples without limitation, known SMS metadata may include: mobile number, carrier, carrier transaction ID, timestamp, destination short code, etc).
Then in the Response SMS Message sent from the SMS Decision Engine to the mobile device, if a standard URL or shortened URL is included to link to the Multimedia Content Session, no information about the user or the resulting session is encoded. This is because both options (URL or URL shortening service) create a single URL, sent in response to all link requests, and followed by all users interacting with the Internet content.
This means that a standard Long URL or a traditional URL shortening service is incapable of associating the SMS metadata with the User Agent and Multimedia Content Session metadata.
Interactive campaigns using the mobile device are provided by the organizations that create the content for distribution. This content can be advertising content, educational content, etc. These organizations seek to collect information about the performance of the campaigns, or calculate a return on investment (ROI). The SMS metadata contains additional data not found in the User Agent and Multimedia Content Session metadata, and merging these three sets of data into one comprehensive set of data exponentially increases the value provided to these organizations.